That middle world
Subtitle: race, performance, and the politics of passing
By: Julia S. Charles
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781469659596
Copyright date: 2020
Subjects: Passing (Identity) in literature; Race awareness; Racially mixed people; Race identity; American literature; African American authors; History and criticism; Race in literature; Racially mixed people in literature; LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American
Description: "During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the idea of white superiority was bolstered by rigid race laws that governed interactions between the races, targeting Black people and relegating them to the lower rungs of the racial caste system. Consequently, American literature-especially that by black writers-began to reflect the cultural phenomenon of racial passing from the antebellum period through the collapse of Reconstruction. In this book, Julia Charles investigates the construction and performance of racial identity in select works of passing literature by Black writers. Charles looks at how Black writers in the nineteenth century have used the trope of racial passing in order to propose new racial categories and, relatedly, new boundaries of identity-essentially, creating a middle world between whiteness and blackness. For mixed-race characters in the Black passing novel Charles argues, race is about resisting and rejecting legally and socially imposed boundaries of identity, and African American authors of racial passing literature developed mixed-race characters that vacillated between multiple worlds as they negotiate these fuzzy and changing margins of identity"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue : That Mandy Oxendine; title: That Middle World; title: That Respectability; title: That Performance; title: That Indefinable Something; title: That Invisibility; title: Epilogue : That Rachel Dolezal.